Tech-Clarity's Jim Brown chats with Martin Hanssmann, COO of manufacturer Oyo Sportstoys, about how his company uses PLM to manage its complex business needs.
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Software products are a critical business tool that can help you improve your business, but there is a better way than traditional big software implementations. Watch PLM 411 to hear about a new approach to PLM.
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Jim Brown: Hi and welcome to PLM 411 where we help manufacturers understand how they can improve and accelerate product innovation and product development. I'm Jim Brown of Tech-Clarity and today, I'm joined by Martin Hanssmann, the COO of a very cool company, OYO Sports, and we’re going to talk to him a little bit about some of the great challenges, good challenges they have through growth and also how PLM can help with those.
As we talked before, I’m just really, really impressed with – first of all again, congratulations, such a cool company. But the growth that you’ve been facing but also the complexity in terms of what you do in managing all of the different products you bring to market. Maybe you can just share a little bit about that with us.
Martin Hanssmann: Yes, thanks and thanks for having me on the show, Jim. OYO sports is a relatively new company. It’s been in existence for a little under three years. We launched an e-commerce business about nine months ago and this really led us to rethink what our company is all about.
We manufacture many figures that are licensed by the various leagues and today we have figures that are licensed by the baseball, the football, and the hockey leagues. Clearly, we’re going to go further than that and there's a lot of complexity there that isn’t necessarily visible to the surface. You're buying a little figure, it’s very cool, it can move around and do things for you.
But managing literally thousands of items, and we add hundreds of items every month to that, in a way that is congruent with the licensing that we have to do with the various leagues, and they all have their own peculiarities and rules on how we actually achieve that very quickly made me realize that although we had a sophisticated ERP system and a very excellent e-commerce engine that went with that and we could use and end to end experience on that, what we didn’t have was really a product life cycle management tool.
We went the first year without that, and we started putting together a vision of what we really felt was missing in the way we’re managing our business and also in our ability to continue to scale the level that we wanted to scale.
Jim: Maybe you can just share a little bit and then maybe we can go through those few challenges we talked a little bit about the vertical integration and how quickly you can turn around a new product because I think most of the people would be pretty impressed with the turnaround.
Martin: We’re in the sports business and there are things that happen every day and really, that’s what our sports fans are all about. They're about being excited about those events and we want them to share that excitement with them and what we do is we create product on not necessarily daily basis but definitely on a weekly basis around these kinds of events.
For example, we just had the Stanley Cup; many of you probably saw that. And one of the things that we were able to do is get product out that was very specific to the winning Kings, six hours after the completion of that game. For us, that’s what fan engagement is about, getting that product to a fan five days later just isn’t the same as getting it out the next day.
Jim: You had a way through the whole double overtime and everything just to get the player [crosstalk].
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Martin: - to get the final result on that. I think that’s where then the complexity. In order to achieve that, we have to be very vertically integrated. We actually have just started our process, we moved all our manufacturing to the US, we mold our own plastic now, we make our own packaging, we die cut it. We sit there and see that we do everything from top to bottom within our own facility at this point, and that is where the complexity is.
When you're that vertically integrated adding all of the new items, you need to have a way of managing that that’s much more sophisticated than simply a bill of materials.
Jim: And you’ve got your versions that you're telling us about before in terms of generations and those things. It’s relatively unique challenges.
Martin: Yes. We have something that’s a little bit different than most people would use in their PLM. We have a generational concept that might be considered a normal version control with other engineering type of companies. But what we also have is we have player series. Let’s take a David Ortiz; we would come up with a new generation of a player once a year but within that year, we might have six, eight, ten, fifteen different series of that player.
Now if he gets traded, of course we have to follow that along to the other leagues and we have to manage the licensing. As we fall through the different teams, there are different potential rules that are involved, we've got hall of fame that can come into play for players that are retired. There's a lot of complexity there that we need to manage very, very closely with regard to each player that we have.
Jim: And those material, I know that because you're vertically integrated, you’ve got artwork packaging. It’s not simple.
Martin: No, and being able to do this cost-effectively and as much as anything speed, we have on something like the Stanley Cup, we had to release approximately 20 players six hours after completion of the game. That needs automation. PLM is a way for us to really achieve a level of automation that you cannot achieve through simple use of an ERP system. And for us, that means that we have to automate the imaging portion of it to get the relevant images as well as the bill of materials that drive this.
For all of these, it’s a brand new item essentially that we sell each time because it’s suddenly different than the one we sold two days ago, for example.
Jim: Right, and it ties back to the licensing and everything so that the interrelationships and managing all of that.
Martin: And then at certain types of events like an all-star game, there are rules around how long we’re able to continue to sell an item that is associated with that particular event and we have to manage that, and that’s another thing where PLM of course will help us manage that life cycles.
Jim: It’s interesting. There are lots of standard PLM problems and you're doing some pretty cool standard feel on things in terms of managing builds materials and revisions and those things. You’ve got your own little nuances so it sounds like you had to take advantage of a little bit of flexibility, too.
Martin: Yes, definitely. We also happen to use our PLM tool for quality management processes as well, it does that fairly well. We’ve got a document version management tool typically with multi PLM products and so we leverage it that way as well.
Jim: That’s fantastic. Listen, thank you for coming in and continued best of luck with the business.
Martin: Thank you, Jim.
Jim: Thanks.
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